Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Cothran's First Law of Tolerance: In which we explain the mechanism by which liberals are now so coercive

Whatever was once prohibited and must now be allowed will eventually become mandatory, and was once mandatory and must now be allowed will eventually be prohibited.

This is just the same principle working in two directions at once. This can be seen operating now in the gay rights and same-sex marriage debates.

The first clause of this law can be seen in the recognition of the legitimacy of homosexuality and gay marriage, until only recently phrased in terms of permissiveness and which has now metastasized into one of imperative. Allowing people to act on their sexual "orientation" (itself an imperative word that replaced the more permissive "preference") is fast being replaced by mandating that people acknowledge its legitimacy through gay rights laws now having been passed in city after city.

The second clause can be seen in the increasing restrictions on those who disagree with the progressivist consensus who are not only not allowed to restrict the definition of marriage to what it always meant, but who are now being told by judges who have suddenly discovered that the 14th amendment mandated genderless marriage are now prohibiting states from defining marriage this way.

These twin tendencies, of course, violate the very principle of tolerance (tolerance being a permissive concept) in favor of a coerciveness of the kind that the champions of tolerance once condemned.

8 comments:

KyCobb
said...

I will once again point out the hypocrisy of the intolerant complaining about their intolerance not being tolerated. Fortunately it appears that the futile struggle against same-sex marriage could end in a few months. Utah is appealing the 10th Circuit's opinion invalidating its same-sex marriage ban to the Supreme Court which could rule next summer if it accepts the appeal.

There's so much wrong with this that I will need multiple consecutive comments just to deal with it.

"Whatever was once prohibited and must now be allowed will eventually become mandatory, and was once mandatory and must now be allowed will eventually be prohibited."

That's a pretty bad mischaracterization of the positions of people who claim to be tolerant. I don't think I even need to explain to you why this is wrong, here goes:

On the first clause: Gay rights advocates do not advocate for gay rights because they were previously denied, but because they believe it is wrong to deny them. They are not rejecting restrictions on gay marriage on a chronological basis, and it is silly to suggest otherwise. On the second clause: how could something mandatory become allowed? Isn't everything mandatory also already allowed? You can't mandate something and disallow it at the same time. Are you saying that previously, these things that were mandatory were also in some weird quantum state between allowed and disallowed? What would that be called? And does gay marriage fit into this category?

"The first clause of this law can be seen in the recognition of the legitimacy of homosexuality and gay marriage, until only recently phrased in terms of permissiveness and which has now metastasized into one of imperative." There are no laws that require religious institutions to recognize gay marriage as legitimate. There are laws that require that religious institutions not deny marriage ceremonies on the basis of race or sexual orientation, but they are still free to say "We're not performing ceremonies to anyone at this time" or to quit wedding couples altogether. Neither of these require a religious institution to marry gay people. If they have objections, they can stop marrying altogether. You might say this entails a de facto requirement, and I might agree with you, but you'd also have to agree that laws forbidding the marriage of anyone but a man and a woman are also de facto discrimination. "The second clause can be seen in the increasing restrictions on those who disagree with the progressivist consensus who are not only not allowed to restrict the definition of marriage to what it always meant, but who are now being told by judges who have suddenly discovered that the 14th amendment mandated genderless marriage are now prohibiting states from defining marriage this way."

You can certainly still define marriage as one man and one woman; you, Martin Cothran, currently do this and will continue to do this until A. you change your mind or B. you stop defining things altogether. No law has the capacity to change that. States are certainly being prohibited from defining marriage as one man and one woman because of the 14th amendment, as you keenly observed. You can say that a law defining marriage as one man and one woman applies to everyone, and you'd correct, but I'd like to point out that in the same vein, a law defining a person as only a white male would also equally apply to everyone. "These twin tendencies, of course, violate the very principle of tolerance (tolerance being a permissive concept) in favor of a coerciveness of the kind that the champions of tolerance once condemned."

Firstly, your conception of tolerance as it applies to civil rights movements is lacking. When I say "I'm going to a diner to get a bite to eat" I do not mean "I'm going to [any] diner to get [a single mouthful of food]. Tolerance, in the context of civil rights movements, is a synecdoche. When you hear a gay marriage advocate use the word 'tolerance', they do not mean tolerance of every thing in existence, and I think you are being intellectually dishonest when you say otherwise.So, having established that the popular definition of tolerance means something different than the dictionary definition, let's look at the dictionary definition. To tolerate something means to "allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference". So, if one disagrees with an action, and intervenes to stop it, someone is being intolerant. You seem to think tolerance is a virtue, going by your word choice, e.g "champions of tolerance". So let's work with these premises:1. tolerance is allowing others to do things one personally disagrees with2. to intervene against something you disagree with is intolerance3. tolerance is a virtueLet's say I assault someone because I don't like their eyebrows. Someone sees me in the act and, abiding by the Cothran doctrine of tolerance, does not intervene, no matter how intolerant my own act is. This person is tolerant, and therefore virtuous. If it seems wrong, it's because it is.

Lastly, I'd like to say that if this blog posting was actual proof of hypocrisy on the part of gay marriage proponents, it still wouldn't make them wrong. If I declare unprovoked assault to be wrong, and then proceeded to beat the crap out of the nearest person, that would not disprove my previous assertion that unprovoked assault is wrong.

Old Rebel, if you can't see the distinction between two men getting married and two siblings getting married, that's on you. But hey, with a name like that, I wouldn't expect you to. So in the name of moral guidance, I will clear things up for you, my confederate pal: do not have sex with your relatives. That is a bad thing. Gay marriage is not a bad thing. You cannot make deformed or retarded children by gay marriage. You cannot exploit familial power dynamics by way of gay marriage.

I'm anticipating hearing the slippery slope argument, and I'm going to tell you not to bother. If you believe gay marriage being legalized would lead to incest being legalized, you also have to conclude that the legalization of straight marriage is what led to the legalization of gay marriage. Which I guess is all well and good, but I don't find many people who advocate for the outlawing of marriage in general and I don't expect you to, either.

Not to mention the whole argument is provably false; out of the 26 states where it is legal to marry one's cousin, 12 currently ban same-sex marriage. Gay marriage and incestuous marriage are two different subjects, as anyone with the basic cognitive ability to break things down into categories can tell.